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Monday, June 9, 2014

Vatican City, 7 June 2014 (VIS) – On
30 May Pope Francis sent a message to the participants in the 19th
Congress of the International Criminal Law Association and the 3rd
Congress of the Latin American Association for Penal Law and
Criminology, held last week in Buenos Aires, in which he shares with
them some ideas which “form part of the Scriptures and the
millennial experience of the People of God” and, in which “in
spite of historical changes, three elements have been constant: the
satisfaction or reparation of damage caused; confession, by which a
man expresses his inner conversion; and contrition, to lead to the
encounter with God's merciful and healing love”.

With reference to the first,
satisfaction, Francis observes that “the Lord has gradually taught
his people that there is a necessary asymmetry between crime and
punishment, that an eye or a broken tooth cannot be restored by
taking or breaking another. It is a matter of bringing justice to the
victim, not punishing the aggressor”, and “in our societies we
tend to think that crimes are solved when we capture and sentence the
criminal, largely avoiding the damage caused or without paying
sufficient attention to the situation in which the victims find
themselves. However, it would be a mistake to identify reparation
solely with punishment, to confuse justice and vengeance, which can
only contribute to increasing violence, even if this latter is
institutionalised. Experience teaches us that the increase and
hardening of penalties often neither solves social problems, nor
reduces crime rates. And, furthermore, this may give rise to serious
social problems, such as overcrowding of prisons or prisoners
detained without trial”.

“In this regard”, he continues,
“means of communication … play a very important role and hold
great responsibility: we depend on them to give accurate information
and not to contribute to creating alarm or social panic when they
provide news of criminal activities. The life and dignity of people
is at stake, and these must be turned into media events, subject to
attention often of an unhealthy nature, condemning the suspects to
social disparagement before being judged or forcing victims, for
sensationalist purposes, to publicly relive their suffering”.

The second aspect, confession, is “the
attitude of those who recognise and admit their guilt. If the
criminal is not sufficiently helped, he or she is not offered the
chance to be able to convert, and ends up as a victim of the system.
… It is necessary to move forward and to do everything possible to
correct, improve and educate the person so that he is able to mature
in respects, so he is not discouraged and faces the damage caused,
rethinking his life without being crushed by the weight of his
miseries. ... And we must ask ourselves why some fall and others do
not, in spite of being in the same condition. Not infrequently
criminality is rooted in economic and social inequality, in networks
of corruption and organised crime, that seek accomplices among the
poorest and victims among the most vulnerable. To prevent this
scourge, it is not enough to have just laws: it is necessary to
construct responsible people able to put them into practice. A
society that is governed solely by market laws and creates false
expectations and superfluous necessities, discards those who are not
at the top and prevents the slow, the weak or the less gifted from
taking an open road in life”.

Finally, contrition is “the gateway
to repentance, the privileged path to the heart of God, Who welcomes
us and always offers us another chance if we open ourselves up to the
truth of penance and allow ourselves to be transformed by His mercy.
... The attitude of God, Who goes before the sinner to offer him His
forgiveness, is shown in this way to be a higher justice, both
equanimous and compassionate, with no contradiction between these two
aspects. Forgiveness, in effect, neither eliminates nor diminishes
the need for rectification required by justice, nor does it ignore
the need for personal conversion, but instead goes beyond this,
seeking to restore relationships and to reintegrate people into
society”.

“I think that here is the great
challenge that we must all face”, concludes the Pope, “so that
the measures taken against evil are not limited to suppressing,
discouraging and isolating those who cause it, but instead help them
to rehabilitate, to re-embark upon the path of good, to be authentic
people who move on from their miseries to become merciful themselves.
Therefore, the Church proposes a form of justice that is humanising,
genuinely reconciliatory, a justice that leads the wrongdoer, through
an educative path of encouraged penance, to rehabilitation and total
reinsertion in the community. How important and good it would be to
take on this challenge, so as not to let it fall into oblivion. How
good it would be to take the necessary steps to ensure that
forgiveness does nto remain exclusively in the private sphere, but
instead attains a real political and institutional dimension to
create harmonious relations of coexistence.